


Just the Beginning

by xRabbitx



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: M/M, One Shot, Pre-Romance, budding friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-07
Updated: 2019-02-07
Packaged: 2019-10-23 22:27:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,334
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17692295
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xRabbitx/pseuds/xRabbitx
Summary: Australia is too small for the ambitions of Junkrat and Roadhog, so they stove-away on a ship heading for Japan. Two weeks spent in a shipping container with nothing but each other's company. Should be perfectly fine... right?Right?!





	Just the Beginning

**Author's Note:**

> Written for The Roadrat Charity Zine 2018 with illustrations by the talented Neroro <3

*

 

          Roadhog doesn’t know nearly as much about boats as he lets on. In fact, he knows next to nothing about boats. His mother took him fishing a few times on some lake when he was little, but that’s eons ago, and a moldy, old dinghy doesn’t really count, he feels. But he knows a lot more than boats than his new boss does because his new boss hasn’t even seen the ocean, let alone been on a boat. But that’s where they’re headed. More specifically, they’re heading to the sad remains of Perth. Compared to Junkertown, Perth is a thriving, glimmering metropolis, but compared to what Perth used to be, the new Perth is a burned-out husk. But the burned-out husk’s harbor is still active because, from his time as an enforcer, Roadhog knows that there are still coming shipments of relief aid from other countries. The aid caravans, taking the aid out to the wasteland, are almost always robbed by various gangs, and the aid usually never makes it to the places it’s supposed to go. The gangs have arrangements with the organizations that send the aid; they send aid with minimal security, the gangs steal it and sell it. The gangs then send the ships back with weapons the organizations can sell. Everyone knows that. Even Roadhog’s new boss, who’s never seen the ocean, knows this, which is why they’re currently sitting in a clammy shipping container, squeezed between Roadhog’s bike and crates of guns and explosives, trying to figure out just how long it’s been since they shipped out from Perth harbor.

 

          “Why d’you care about that anyways?” Junkrat asks and picks at his left ear the way Roadhog has learned he always does when he’s bored.

          Roadhog shrugs.

          “Good to know,” he says behind his mask. “Trip takes 14 days. Want to know how much time’s left.”

          “Getting antsy, eh?” Junkrat grins and looks proud for some reason. “It’s alright, you can say it.”

          “Say what?”

          “How impressed you are.”

          “Impressed?”

          “Yeah, mate, it’s okay. I’m flattered, but not surprised.”

          Roadhog just stares at Junkrat. What the hell is the guy jabbering about? Roadhog asks him, and the look of pride on Junkrat’s face falters a bit.

          “You’re… you’re impressed with my genius plan for our worldwide heist spree, and you’re excited to get started,” Junkrat replies, but it sounds a lot more like a question than a stated fact.

          “How can I be impressed with something I don’t know about?” Roadhog counters and scratches his belly, right on the pig.

          “What d’you mean, you don’t know about it?” Junkrat snorts. “I told you just the other day, mate!”

          “You didn’t tell me anything.”

          “Codswallop, I remember telling you!”

          “When?”

          “Just the other day! I was telling you about the first five steps of the plan, and you was thanking me for being brilliant, and then you rode off on that giant wombat, and—huh, now that I think on it, it might’ve been a dream.”

          “You really think so?”

          “Very funny, mate. It was very realistic, I’ll have you know.”’

          “Giant wombats?”

          Junkrat scoffs and tosses the carpenter's pencil he’s been chewing on for half a day at Roadhog. It hits the glass in his left eyehole with a small clink and bounces off to land on the floor of the container. It’s actually quite an impressive mark to hit, especially considering that Junkrat doesn’t seem to know about the concept of aiming. In the few short months in which Roadhog has been employed as Junkrat’s bodyguard, they have gotten into a few altercations, and while Junkrat has proven himself to be more than capable of looking out for himself in a fight, aiming certainly hasn’t seemed to be one of his strengths. The first time Roadhog saw Junkrat fight, he’d been convinced that his new boss had completely lost his mind. It had been a flurry of grenades and scrap metal he hurled at their adversaries, but he had somehow miraculously come out of it without a scratch, which is a lot more than can be said for the gang that had tried to rob them. In fact, Roadhog had wondered why Junkrat even needed a bodyguard, because he seemed more than fine on his own. Roadhog hasn’t asked, though, because the plan is still to make off with Junkrat’s treasure the first chance he gets.

          “Fine, tell me,” Roadhog says when Junkrat has been sulking for almost half an hour. He picks up the pencil from the floor and offers it to Junkrat, who just glares at it for a moment before snatching it out of Roadhog’s large fingers with surprising deftness.

          “Nah, not if you’re gonna be a wanker about it,” Junkrat mutters and shoves the torch dangling on a string from the ceiling out of the way as he turns an shuffles over to climb into the sidecar of Roadhog’s bike where he’s built a sort-of nest from some old blankets. Roadhog was going to throw him out, but the whole thing is so weird that he can’t bring himself to do it.

 

*

 

Two days later (Roadhog thinks it’s two days later, but it’s hard to tell when you live inside a container), the torch gives up. It flickers for a bit, then fades before completely turning off, leaving the inside of the container pitch black. Junkrat still hasn’t told Roadhog about this grand plan of his, and Roadhog has stopped asking. At this point, he doesn’t care much anyway. He has lost all sense of time and purpose inside the container, but he’s getting increasingly convinced that they’re probably going to die in here, either from lack of food and water or because they’ve finally gotten on each other’s nerves so much that they’ll end up killing each other. The fact that Roadhog doesn’t know what the plan entails hasn’t stopped Junkrat from talking and talking and talking about what he’ll spend all the money on, though. Roadhog stops listening after a while, but he does manage to catch something about “ten scrap cars to pick apart and put together again” and “a vat of those marshmallow thingies”.

          “Hey, Boss,” Roadhog grunts as he fumbles around in the leather satchel that’s strapped to the back of the bike. “Where did you put the batteries?”

          “Eh?” Junkrat sounds distracted, but Roadhog can’t tell for sure, because he can’t see shit in this darkness.

          “The batteries,” Roadhog repeats, rummaging blindly through the bag. “Where d’you put them?”

          “Thought you’d packed them, mate.”

          “What? No, you said packed them.”

          “You’re off your rocker, mate, I never said that.”

          It would be so easy. Roadhog could just find Junkrat in the dark and break his scrawny neck in a single snap, and then Roadhog’s life would be infinitely easier thanks to the lack of the fucking infuriating pestilence also known as his boss. But Roadhog just takes a deep breath and slowly counts to 10 inside his head to calm himself down. Going on a bloody rampage on this rotten boat won’t solve anything. He’ll just have to stick it out until they reach Japan, and then everything will get better. Most people would be driven up the proverbial wall being stuck with one person for two solid weeks, but also being stuck in a shipping container just makes everything so much worse. If only he had some music, but most electrical gadgets got fried in the omnium blast, and getting your hands on working ones is near impossible. Right on cue, Junkrat begins to hum to himself, and Roadhog is glad that he’s wearing his mask and that it’s pitch black in here because otherwise, Junkrat would see him smile. That’s the thing that annoys Roadhog the most about Junkrat; that despite how stupidly annoying he is most of the time, he still has a strange ability to make Roadhog smile, and it’s been like that ever since they met. It’s a bit unsettling, actually.

          Another couple of rounds of sleeping and groping around in the darkness later, Roadhog feel like he might actually go insane. Not being able to see anything but a tiny dot of light from a hole in the side of the container is really getting to him, and he doesn’t understand how Junkrat can appear to be so unaffected. Nothing seems to affect the guy in general. Even in the darkness, Junkrat is humming happily away, muttering to himself and rummaging and shuffling around on his side of the container. Obviously, Roadhog can’t tell what Junkrat is doing, and even though he could probably ask, he’s not about to because he’s still pissed off about the batteries. Maybe Junkrat is building something? But how could he without any light whatsoever, and wouldn’t Roadhog hear some hammering or something? It sounds more like… scraping? And he’s pretty sure he sometimes hear a ruffle of paper. Is Junkrat folding a giant fucking paper crane or what? The mystery is beginning to bother Roadhog enough that’s he’s willing to forego the whole battery incident, just so he can know. 

          “And then just through here,” Junkrat mumbles. “Yeah, yeah, that’s good. Clever Junkrat.”

          Roadhog is just about to open his mouth and ask when he stops himself. No. No, shut up, don’t ask. If Junkrat wanted him to know, he’d tell him. It’s probably something idiotic, anyway, and it would probably only serve to piss off Roadhog even more. Or be the final straw that breaks the camel’s back, sending Roadhog spiraling into true madness.

          It only takes another couple of hours of Junkrat’s muttering, though, before Roadhog’s resolve is fading once more. He’d been trying to distract himself with eating the sea biscuits they have brought, but even the crunches from the dry, semi-stale biscuits aren’t enough to drown out Junkrat’s muttering or his own curiosity. Instead of opening his mouth and asking, though, Roadhog tries to buy himself some time by getting to his feet and wandering closer to Junkrat’s side of the container. Maybe if Junkrat notices him, he’ll start talking on his own, or maybe an actual sun might physically manifest inside the container and either light up the container or burn Roadhog to ash. Either way, he wouldn’t be dying of curiosity anymore. Wandering nonchalantly around the container, however, isn’t so easy given the lack of light, and even though Roadhog tries to stretch his hands out in front of him to avoid bumping into anything, his butt does knock something to the floor when he tries to edge around the bike. It lands on the metal floor of the container with a thud, but a second later, a metallic noise erupts when something rolls out of the bag that Roadhog most likely knocked off the handlebars of the bike. It must have been hanging there for a while because Roadhog had totally forgotten about it. 

          “What’s that?” Junkrat asks somewhere in the dark.

          “Nothing,” Roadhog grunts as he kneels down to grope around for the bag and whatever rolled out of it. He quickly finds the bag—which is more like a burlap sack—and a moment later, he also finds the stuff that rolled out. As his hand touches it and he realizes what it is, Roadhog feels like the biggest idiot on this boat, and possibly on this side of the planet, too. You could probably fry an egg on Roadhog’s forehead as he picks the batteries off the floor, because yes, those are the bloody batteries. The bloody batteries that Roadhog himself packed, and the very same batteries that he put into the sack and hung on the handlebars of the bike to make sure that he could find them again. As quietly as he possibly can, Roadhog reaches up and finds the flashlight that’s still dangling from the ceiling. Part of him is tempted to just hide the batteries and spend the rest the of the trip in darkness so he won’t have to admit to Junkrat that he was right. But that would be silly, and he really doesn’t like that he’s that stubborn—things like stubbornness and principles will get you killed in the wasteland—so he powers through his instincts and replaces the batteries in the torch. Junkrat lets out a shriek when the inside of the container is suddenly bathed in bright light. The light coming from the flashlight isn’t even that bright, but after several days in darkness, even the dullest of lights feels blinding. Roadhog has to close his eyes for a moment before he can ever so slowly begin to crack them open and let his pupils get used to the surroundings. Everything is completely white at first, but then shapes and shadows begin to fade into view, and Roadhog’s vision eventually returns to normal. He’s about to open his mouth and explain himself to Junkrat, who’s still covering his eyes when he spots something on the container wall that definitely wasn’t there before the light went out. At first, it looks like Junkrat has stuck a lot of large paper sheets to the wall, each covered in lines that criss-cross each other, but then the lines all start to form… buildings?

          “Are those… are those blueprints?” Roadhog asks, and he doesn’t even care to try and sound less impressed than he is. “Did you  _draw_ these?”

          “What?” Junkrat peeks out between his fingers still covering his eyes. “Oh, yeah! That’s the bank in Dorado, that’s that museum in Paris where they keep that smirking sheila, and that—uh, that’s the Pachimari Museum in Tokyo, seeing as I reckon you’d like to you there due to your infatuation of those bloody things.”

          Junkrat says that last sentence without meeting Roadhog’s gaze. Instead, he stares down at his feet and shrugs a bit while grinning to himself.

          Roadhog can’t believe it. If he didn’t know any better, he’d bet money that Junkrat is lying through his teeth, but Junkrat doesn’t seem the scheming type. It’s not that he doesn’t lie, because he lies to himself every day, thinking that the Queen will ever let him back into Junkertown alive, no matter how much gold he brings back. But this? This is legit. It’s not that the blueprints are perfect either; some of the lines are wonky, some of the dimensions are perhaps off by a bit, but all in all, they look as good as any hand-drawn blueprints would.

          “Who else would’ve made them?” Junkrat scoffs and shakes his head as he finally looks up and meets Roadhog’s incredulous gaze (well, it’s incredulous behind his mask).

          “But—how?”

          “With my pencil, of course, you dolt!”

          “Right, but how? Did you just draw all this out of the thin fucking air?” Roadhog is so blown away that he totally forgets to be annoyed with Junkrat.

          “Of course not!” Junkrat snorts and shoves his flesh forefinger into his own forehead. “Used my thinking noodle, didn’t I?”

          “How can you just ‘use your thinking noodle’ to draw shit like this?”

          “Well, I’d seen them, obviously,” Junkrat says, rolling his eyes as if this was a given. “Borrowed one of them fancy tablets off Dagger, dug around a bit on the old web and found them, just lying around on one of those secret sites.”

          “You found them online?” Roadhog asks, feeling like his IQ is dropping by the second.

          “Yeah, why’d you keep saying everything I say back to me, mate?”

          “It’s just—” Roadhog gestures at the very elaborate blueprints on the container wall. “I don’t understand how you can take a look at some picture online and then replicate them perfectly weeks later.”

          “Just used the photo-taker in my head, didn’t I?” Junkrat says, once again acting like he isn’t sounding like a total madman. 

          “I don’t even want to ask…”

          “What d’you mean, mate? I just used it like anyone would, and then I keep the pictures in my head til I need them again, see?”

          Ah. Of course. Of bloody course, Junkrat has photographic memory. Roadhog feels ridiculous for not guessing this ages ago because everything makes a lot more sense now. This explains why Junkrat has always been able to recreate any weapon, any vehicle with nothing but his memory. And of course, Junkrat wouldn’t realize that this isn’t normal, that he’s… exceptional. But Roadhog really doesn’t have the energy to have that conversation with him right now. He’s way more interested in studying the blueprints. He had honestly thought that Junkrat’s big, scary Master Plan would be a jumbled mess of a half-assed plan, concocted in a hyperactive brain with a just as hyperactive imagination, but no. These schematics look well-thought out and well-researched. Roadhog just can’t marry the idea of the Junkrat he knows to the Junkrat who drew these. It’s like two completely different people, and for a single, manic second, Roadhog considers the possibility of Junkrat having a mild-mannered, rational twin stashed away somewhere in that bag he always drags with him. The fact that Junkrat has also included the Tokyo Pachimari Museum into their world-wide heist spree is just a little more than Roadhog can bear. Junkrat is supposed to be a stumbling idiot with half a brain, not some secret mastermind who notices little things about his bodyguard and then makes gestures like this that are thoughtful and… and… and  _sweet_ .

          “I’m god damn sick of this container!” Roadhog growls and turns away from the blueprints of the wall. He needs air, he needs to breathe some fresh fucking air right now. He stalks over to the far end of the container, grabs the huge steel bar on the lock of the container doors, and pulls it back with a loud, metallic groan from the lock. If any of the people on the ship try anything, there’s a nice, bottomless sea Roadhog can dump them into. Right as the large, doors swing open, Roadhog holds up a hand to shield his eyes against the bright light he reckons will be streaming into the container from the outside. But no lights come spilling in. It’s the middle of the night, and the skies are dark and cloudless. A cold breeze meets Roadhog, and even though he’s not at all dressed for cold sea breezes (neither of them is), it’s the best Roadhog has felt in a while.

          “C’mon,” he grunts at Junkrat before he leaves the container. Well, he tries to leave, but there’s nowhere to leave to. Their container is nestled on the second out of three tiers of matching containers. Roadhog can’t tell how many containers are in each row, but there’s a lot. There’s no platform or any kind of solid ground outside their container. The nearest horizontal surface is the deck, and it’s at least 15 feet below them. Roadhog is about to curse in frustration when he sees it. Right there, out on the horizon, a black landmass is visible and on it is a glittering string of lights. Roadhog can’t make out any buildings or shapes even, but he sees the lights. It must of one of Japan’s coastal cities. Tokyo isn’t far away now.

          “Well, I’ll be buggered,” Junkrat mutters, coming up to Roadhog’s side. He gazes out towards the lights with mouth and eyes wide open. For a moment, he just stares in complete, breathless silence.

          “I didn’t even know there was this many lights in the world,” Junkrat then says in almost a whisper, and that’s so sad and endearing at the same time that Roadhog doesn’t really know what to do with himself. It gets worse when Junkrat turns to look at him with a big, happy smile full of crooked teeth. He’s probably the happiest Roadhog has ever seen him. It’s impossible for Roadhog not to reach out and pat Junkrat’s shoulder a bit.

          “This is just the beginning, Boss,” he mutters and smiles secretly to himself behind his mask. “Just the beginning.”

 

*

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading, friends :)
> 
> HMU on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/drrtyrabbit) or [Tumblr](https://rabbitvswonderland.tumblr.com/)!


End file.
